Goplat wrote:

Brion Vibber wrote:

...

Unique id verification will probably get added at some point for markup purity (a validator will complain at you if you have non-unique id attributes).

This XHTML fetish has got to go. It's nothing but a waste of the Apache servers' CPU.

HTML 4.01 imposes roughly the same requirements as XHTML 1.0. It would be slightly looser with case insensitivity and not always requiring close tags, but otherwise about the same. It has almost exactly the same set of allowed elements, attributes, and attribute values. id attributes are still required to be unique. The same set of named character entity references are valid.

Outputting HTML 4.01 would not actually save us any work over outputting XHTML 1.0.

So... what's the big benefit of using XHTML? Well, you can serve it with the application/xhtml+xml mime type (or whatever the W3C says it should be served as this week), and enjoy great new features like your page not displaying at all until it's completely finished loading and parsing. This may seem annoying, but it's necessary to protect people from seeing part of an invalid document, which would of course be a horrible traumatic experience and scar them for life.

Thanks for the non sequitur rant; I hope you feel better now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)